Conceptually, visualization of music is not new. Composers have always described music with visual verbiage. “Tonal colors”, “orchestral shapes”, and “contrapuntal lines” are but a few of the phrases used by those struggling to articulate the nuances of their abstract aural art in familiar visual terms. In fact, developing the ability to visualize music, to quite literally see its shapes, textures, and colors in the mind's eye has been a goal of traditional training in composition for some 400 years.
Around the turn of the century, pioneers such as Wassily Kandinsky brought visual music out of their imaginations and onto canvas. Upon attending a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin for the first time, Kandinsky described the “shattering” synaesthetic experience: “I saw all my colours in my mind's eye. Wild lines verging on the insane formed drawings before my very eyes.” Elsewhere in his prolific writing, Kandinsky explains that he associated individual colors with the keys of the piano and believed that musical harmony found its analogue in the harmony of colors produced by blending pigments on the palette. His bold use of abstract color and form evolved as a means to translate music's abstract components into the visual realm.
At the same time, the pioneers of modern music were using visual concepts to guide their development. Debussy, for instance, had originally wanted to be a painter. The famous French pianist Alfred Cortot, a contemporary of Debussy, explained that “Debussy possessed the ability to reproduce in sound the ‘optical impression’ that he had either formed directly or through his contact with pictorial art and literature.” In perhaps his greatest example of pictorial music, La Mer, Debussy conveys his visual impression of the sea through a sonic image, even going so far as to translate ripples on the water's surface into shimmering violins.
But composers like Scriabin wanted to go even further, actually integrating projections of colors and images into live performances of their new works. At this stage, a new breed of visual artist began taking the first steps toward artistic synthesis. Turn-of-the century projection technology such as the magic lantern was very popular and was often used to project religious imagery coordinated to music during church services. Four decades later, Disney and the Philadelphia Orchestra proved that a seamless blend of classical music and then cutting-edge animation and movie projection techniques could bring symphonic music to the forefront of popular culture with the motion picture Fantasia.
More recently, music has been translated into visual images using computers and other electronics. For instance, many people are familiar with the visualization software incorporated into digital jukeboxes like Apple's ITunes, Microsoft's Windows Media Player, and MusicMatch Jukebox, which display a visual moving image that is somehow responsive to the music that is being played. The visualization method utilized by these applications is extremely rudimentary in terms of how the generated images are tied to or responsive to the music that is being played. Typically, these systems rely on simple methods of audio analysis to provide only surface-level music analysis. These basic methods include envelope detection, global loudness tracking, and frequency band amplitude spike detection. For instance, these systems may respond to a dramatic change in volume within a musical composition by showing a reading of the spikes in various frequency bands within the music such that a change in volume is represented visually. Alternately, changes in the image could be triggered according to user assignment rather than automatically, but with these systems, the underlying music analysis techniques, such as the oscilloscope showing volume spikes, derive only minimal musical information and meaning from the audio file and therefore are able to convey only minimal musical information with their resulting visuals. For instance, by watching the visuals that result from these systems with the speakers turned off, it would be impossible to determine what musical piece is generating the visuals because most of the musical information has been lost in the translation to visual form. Musical styles as diverse as classical and hip hop can and do produce extremely similar visual results using these systems. Many of these systems do not even synchronize their visuals to the basic beat and tempo of the music.
Some individuals working in the field of music visualization have attempted to develop score-based music visualization software that incorporates data corresponding to individual notes as well as some of the underlying structural elements within the music. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 6,411,289 discloses a computer system for producing a three dimensional illustration of a musical work that determines for each sound of the musical work its tone, harmony, and tonality. Each of these characteristics of the musical work is assigned a value within a table so that it can be displayed on a three-dimensional graph having a time axis, a tone axis, and a harmony axis. By visually inspecting the static graph that results, one can determine the tone, the harmony, and the tonality of each sound by locating its position on the graph. The graph may also be colored in accordance with the corresponding tone, harmony, and tonality of a sound being played, and the graph may be scrolled from right to left and viewed from multiple angles.
While the visual representation generated by the software of U.S. Pat. No. 6,411,289 may reasonably accurately reflect the sounds to which it corresponds in the technical sense, it is actually much more difficult to read and understand the corresponding sound than it is with a standard musical score. The system requires the use of a predetermined grid layout with each note and harmony represented by pre-determined polygon shapes that are spread across the grid according to a pre-determined system. This system is inflexible and often results in impenetrable visual clutter if one attempts to represent all layers of a complex musical score simultaneously. For instance, with this system, individual notes are represented by solid colored structures that resemble skyscraper buildings of varying height spread across the grid. Only a limited number of these note structures can fit on the grid before it becomes impossible to determine which notes correspond to which instrumental layers because the notes in one layer block one's view of the notes in another layer. The only practical solution with this system is to limit the number of musical layers that are being visualized at any one time. While this may be adequate for educational situations where one wishes to teach students to follow only the melody line, or to follow harmonic changes, or some other element, the visuals resulting from this system cannot truly represent all of the information in the score simultaneously.
Additionally, this system relies on a proprietary animation software program that requires a cumbersome array of tables that organize the musical input data. The system cannot be readily adapted for use with existing animation programs or alternate methods of musical analysis. Furthermore, the system provides no flexible means for synchronizing its visuals to the changing tempos of live or recorded performance. It is, in effect, a closed system that may be adequate for its particular and limited educational purpose, but is not flexible enough to be reasonably adapted for artistic, creative, or other uses.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved method and apparatus for music visualization.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an improved method and apparatus for generating a visual representation of a musical composition that visually preserves all or substantially all of the information that is represented in the corresponding standard musical score.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a visualization system that may incorporate any available method of musical analysis, including traditional tonal analysis, to include mathematical interpolation of musical data.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for generating a simulated or actual visible three-dimensional representation of a musical composition that accurately reflects the corresponding sound and is not difficult to read.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for generating an accurate visual representation of music in real time as the music is being created or played.
It is yet one more object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for music visualization that generates an image corresponding to the music from which a layperson can appreciate the structure of the music.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a visualization system that is flexible enough to be realized through any combinations of existing or emerging music analysis systems and software, such that said music analysis systems and software may provide input data for music visualizations.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a visualization system that is flexible enough to be realized through any combinations of existing or emerging visual animation systems and software.
It is yet one more object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for music visualization that may be applied to an audio recording, such as a CD or MP3 recording, such that visuals generated by the invention may be marketed alongside their corresponding audio recording files as downloadable files for sale on I-tunes, or similar pay-per-download services.
It is yet one further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for music visualization that may be embodied within a downloadable software program that consumers can use to automatically generate visuals for any recording or live performance.
It is yet one more object of the present invention to provide a visualization system that may be adapted for any number of entertainment purposes, including video games and virtual reality rides.